This invention is directed generally to an analog storage device and more particularly to a device for very high speed sampling of analog pulse information.
There is a great need to extend the range of measurement capabilities of high speed, very short lived electrical phenomena. Such measurements are particularly important in the growing fields of laser communications research, laser fusion energy research, nuclear research, weapons study, and high speed imaging. Other possible applications include biological research, materials research, and accelerator and high energy physics research. Transient digitizing techniques are already in use in most of these areas. However, in known systems, the accuracy degrades significantly with increases in transient speed of the signal to be sampled.
Prior efforts in this field have been limited by the fact that the storage capacitor for storing the signal sample must be kept extremely small, rendering it highly susceptible to leakage which degrades the accuracy of the sample. Moreover, because of the small size of the capacitor, the sample can only be held for a very short time.
A further limitation of known systems in the field is that they are not adaptable to simultaneous reading of a plurality of simultaneously occurring signals.
Current known methods are limited to sampling speeds of about 100 MHz with accuracies of 6-8 bits. These devices, known as flash analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), are expensive, consume high power, and require high speed, high power and expensive memories for data storage. Dual range techniques to increase the accuracy beyond eight bits become approximately twice as expensive.